Also wtf is with that website? “Data Tracking Consent required for free use”? I’m like 99% sure that’s a wilful and deliberate GDPR violation.

Oracle has been a castle built on sand for a long time. Their entire business model hinged on pulling off massive pricing bait-and-switches with large companies, and there’s only so many of those you can do before people get wise to it.

As far as I can tell they’re coming faster than they’re going :(

The company run by sex predators is doing other unsavoury shit, you say?

I don’t know how old “abc” is, but it’s particularly painful for those of us who remember $100 going from getting us a 32Kb RAM pack, to 1Mb, to 64Mb, to 256Mb, to 1Gb, to 16Gb, and then just fucking stop for ten years, and now going back to no longer being able to even get us 16Gb any more. It’s like stuff stopped getting better a decade ago, and everything is being made worse by the greed of rich arseholes

Not all reiterative spamlike garbage is clanker slop. Some of it is deliberately written to prioritize SEO over respecting the reader or producing anything of quality. Either way thanks for giving me the heads-up not to give them any of my time.

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Modern games rarely even fit on one disc

That’s deliberate on their part too, though. New storage formats have been coming out once a decade going back to the dawn of electronic computing. Pioneer demonstrated a 400Gb optical disc exactly 8 years ago to the day. The technology exists, they’re just choosing not to mass market it.

The massive post-install downloads thing is also a commercial decision, not an immutable fact.

Excellent. Can you imagine if the USA had gone on to win the World Cup after that debacle? It would have been the final nail in the coffin for their reputation as a country.

You say that as though corporations are fucking everything up for their own amusement, rather than in the service of making sure the “regular American” gets their luxuries for cheap.

I have to occasionally remind myself that some awful people go to church for the same reason sick people go to hospital. They can tell there’s something not right.

You’re just grasping now.

So you’ve never run out of space on your HDD, or replaced your machine, or wanted to lend or sell your game? You’re in the minority.

Publishers have proved time and time and time again that they can’t be trusted to keep that download available to you after you’ve handed the money over.

Discworld (1995) came with an actual t-shirt in the box. But there was an insane period in the early 2000s where they’d stopped doing manuals, maps and other extras but still packaged the disc in a box the size of a 450g cornflakes packet.

I’m ok with manuals not being a thing, because it’s a reflection of improvements in both software and game design where you don’t need to read 24 pages of text before you can play a game. But I’m not ok with publishers basically killing the secondary market.

People seeding obscure shit is what makes the whole thing viable. Keep up the good work.

I was once at a massive global company that seemed to actively encourage it. Access control in the building was super tight and we weren’t allowed on each others’ floors, had separate break rooms, the lot.

To the manufacturer? Pennies. It’s made of the same stuff DVDs are. They’re only expensive to the consumer because the entire industry hates the idea of them.

You don’t even have to get high-mindedly preachy, it’s a bad take on its own terms, since it hinges on the notion that the population at large are all “dumb” and therefore deserve bad things.

Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enshittification is the inevitable result of shareholders demanding endless growth at all costs.